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Thursday, September 18, 2014

Listening Flow

To dovetail off of my post from last week on reading flow, just recently in one of my Latin 1 classes, I was telling a story in Latin. It was not an Ask a Story a'la TPRS style, but rather it was a story which I had written to introduce some new vocabulary and structures. In addition to telling the story and "pointing and pausing" to the target words on the board whenever they came up, I also was circling questions. After about 10 minutes, one of my students said, "Why do you keep asking us questions?! Can't we just listen to you tell the story?!"At first, I was taken aback by this student's effrontery - how dare he question what I was doing, considering that the purpose of circling was to get students like him to interact with the language? But then I realized what he was saying: he simply wanted to hear the story and to enjoy it without any interruptions. I was the one getting in the way of that with my circling and asking questions. My series of questions was disrupting the picture forming in his mind. Essentially, I was interrupting his listening flow.This is not to say that circling and PQAs do not have their place - they do. At the same time though, I realize now that it is also important to give students a chance to simply enjoy the language and to experience it without any disuruptions. As Carol Gaab says, "Circling can get REALLY OLD, REALLY FAST for students." If I am delivering the language in an understandable way, then it should be quite easy for students to enjoy the language without much difficulty.